Dialed In Lab exists because of a disagreement that never got settled at the last place any of us worked. A client asked how close the screen was to the golf course. The answer given was “very close”. Nobody in the room could produce a number, and the client was right to notice.
| Opened | 2016 |
|---|---|
| Enclosed bays | Three |
| Instruments in Bay One | Two, different types |
| Audit seasons run | Nine |
| Paired blocks in the sheet | Over 400 |
| Manufacturer agreements | None |
Eugene gets somewhere near forty-five inches of rain in a normal year, and almost all of it falls between October and May. Any fitting studio in the Willamette Valley has to solve this, and there are only two honest options.
Defensible, and a few shops do it. It means turning away work for six months, and it means your clients are fitted only in the conditions that flatter equipment. It also means that a golfer who plays chiefly in the wet half of the year never gets fitted for the golf they actually play.
Which is what we chose. It means accepting that every full-swing distance figure on our screen is a model output, and then doing the unglamorous work of measuring how wrong that model is, club by club, summer after summer.
In our first summer we assumed the gap would be small and uniform — a couple of yards, roughly the same everywhere. It was neither. Driver carry was overstated by a margin that grew with clubhead speed. Wedges went the other way entirely. Spin on full wedges was so far out that we stopped quoting it for a season while we worked out why.
That first table was not a marketing asset. It was a list of things we had been telling clients that were not quite true, and rewriting the way we ran sessions took most of the following winter.
None of this makes outdoor testing the better instrument. Outdoors, the wind moves, the turf varies from one lie to the next, and the ball you are hitting has been sitting in wet grass. A January session and a March session held outdoors would differ for a dozen reasons, none of them the club.
The bay holds surface, temperature, ball and lighting nearly constant. That control is what lets us compare two shafts fairly, and comparison is what a fitting is. The grass exists to keep the bay honest about absolute numbers, not to replace it.
No manufacturer agreement obliges us to move a volume of anything, and nobody on the bench is paid on component sales. Those two facts are not virtues, they are plumbing — but they are the plumbing that makes it possible to tell a client their driver is fine and they should spend the money on wedges instead.
We also do not sell lessons, do not take trade-ins, and do not carry a retail wall. The studio has one product, which is a measured opinion about your equipment, and everything else is a distraction from it.
Chad Drive is not a scenic address and we are not going to pretend otherwise. It is a concrete building with good ceiling height and three roll-up doors, which is exactly what an enclosed bay needs and exactly what a retail frontage does not provide.
Parking is directly outside. There is no counter to queue at, because the studio runs by appointment and there is no reason for anyone to be waiting.
Tell us which club is bothering you and roughly when you can get to Chad Drive. We reply with two or three slots and a note about what to bring.